[Casey2296]

Great photos and stories, thanks for sharing.

I played a couple years of little league but the violence of football appealed to me more (yes I was an angry child) so that's the way I went. Brent Jones of the 49ers and I played together for a few years. He went on to the Pros, I found motorcycles, fast cars, and even faster women more appealing.

I do have many memories of my Son coming up through Little League though, here's one;

I coached a few years which was a lot of fun but found a lot of the parents were pretentious, conniving, unpleasant people thinking little Johnny was the next Babe Ruth or Dads who tried to live their failed baseball dreams through their kid. All pretty disappointing.

At the end of Little Leage when my Son was 14 I hatched a plan to put together a Travel Team, I grabbed two Dads who were great guys, one was an incredible pitching coach whose Son is currently in the A's system, they are both friends to this day.

I told them both of my plan, we would draft parents instead of kids. If you were a shitty parent chances are you had a shitty kid and vice versa. I gave no thought to the kids skill level and I only had three rules.

1. Do your best on the field at all times.
2. To be on our Team you had to volunteer so many hours of community service.
3. Also, every kid would get to play no matter the score or baseball situation.
4. I made them all sign a contract.

We built our Team, named the Oaks in honor of the Oakland PCL team. My brother donated the money to get them the classiest looking home and away uni's and we were on our way. Essentially a real life bad news bears experiment.

We volunteered at homeless shelters, learned what it was like to be homeless, volunteered at Senior Centers, anything that needed some able bodied young men I would volunteer them for. We taught them how to recognize and control their emotions both on and off the field. Taught them how to be professional and have class. And practiced baseball, lots and lots of baseball.

Our first tournament we went up against a Team made up of the parents/kids that I spoke about at the open. They were good, real good. We just told our kids relax, have a good time, remember what we taught you, you guys are already winners no matter the score at the end because you have character. Everybody played as per our promise, the other team chalked up an early lead but our kids kept their cool, scratched out a few runs and went up by one in the 4th. You could feel the other Team melt down from across the field, parents, coaches, and kids alike. Blood in the Water boys just keep playing our game. I forget how many runs we won by, what I do remember about that day is the smiles on every face of the kids and their parents alike.

I've already gone on too long but as a reward for becoming good humans we took them on a 2 week trip that started at a Fenway Park night game and ended at a 10 day tournament in Cooperstown NY field of dreams.

But that's another story...